Keynote Talk Title

The Large Model Nexus: Ascension of Emergent AI

We entered an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) showing emergent skills, or, in other words, abilities that have not explicitly been trained for. After end-to-end learning representations automatically from data and self-optimisation of algorithms by automatic machine learning or specifically neural architecture search in the case of deep learning, this marks an age where one may not even need specific data for a task given a suited general-purpose pre-trained model that shows according emergent behaviour. Such emergence comes from the large number of parameters of these “large models” mostly based on transformer architectures and massive data usually exploited by almost exclusively self-supervised learning. This talk will give examples of such emergence from the fields of Affective Computing and Computer Audition and discuss the implications for tomorrow’s AI, but also AI ethics. It will show where we will likely focus our development efforts to design the next generation of AI not only to be more performant, but also more responsible.

About Speaker

Björn W. Schuller, Imperial College London, UK / TUM, Germany

Björn W. Schuller received his diploma, doctoral degree, habilitation, and Adjunct Teaching Professor in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing all in EE/IT from TUM in Munich/Germany where he is Full Professor and Chair of Health Informatics. He is also Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Head of GLAM at Imperial College London/UK, co-founding CEO and current CSO of audEERING, Principal Investigator in the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) and permanent Visiting Professor at HIT/China amongst other Professorships and Affiliations. Previous stays include Full Professor and Chair at the University of Augsburg/Germany, independent research leader within the Alan Turing Institute as part of the UK Health Security Agency, Full Professor at the University of Passau/Germany, Key Researcher at Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria, and the CNRS-LIMSI in Orsay/France. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Golden Core Awardee of the IEEE Computer Society, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the ELLIS, Fellow of the ISCA, Fellow and President-Emeritus of the AAAC, Elected Full Member Sigma Xi, and Senior Member of the ACM. He (co-)authored 1,400+ publications (60,000+ citations, h-index=100+), is Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health and was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing amongst manifold further commitments and service to the community. His 50+ awards include having been honoured as one of 40 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 by the WEF in 2015. Currently, he was awarded IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer 2024.